On April 14, the CDC filed a report that said a TB outbreak in a
Jacksonville hospital led to 13 deaths, six in children, and
nearly 100 illnesses and would take a large effort to stop the
outbreak, says Singer. Nine days earlier, Florida passed a budget
cut that shrank the state's health department and forced the
early closure of A.G. Holley State Hospital, where TB has been
treated for over a half century.

So while key state lawmakers focused on how to manage the budget
cuts, the 25-page report on the outbreak went largely unnoticed
for nearly three months:

Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the
health officials made a conscious decision not to not tell the
public, repeating a decision they had made in 2008, when the same
strain had appeared in an assisted living home for people with
schizophrenia.

That report mentioned that 3,000 people had been in dangerously
close contact with TB over the past two years in state prisons
and homeless shelters, yet only 253 people, less than 10 percent,
had been evaluated for the disease, the Post says.

Treatment for TB could be quite costly. With two years of
treatment and dozens of pills a day, the Post reported that
medical costs could reach $275,000 for those afflicted with the
illness. To top all that, the CDC report said that the outbreak
had spread to the general population, which was not informed of
this for months.

Until last Friday Rep. Matt Hudson, R-Naples, who was the main
voice behind the shutdown of A.G. Holley hospital, said he did
not know about the CDC report. When informed, he said that money
would be allotted and he told the Post that "there is every bit
of understanding that we cannot not take care of people who have
a difficult case of TB."